First Developer Publishes Changes to the Master MUD Repository

Sally has finished creating and unit testing her first batch of changes, so she saves her work and prepares to merge it into the master repository.

She chooses File , selects Multiuser , and then select Publish to Network. If she forgot to add any new objects to a project, a detailed warning is displayed so that she can add the objects to her project and try the merge again. Otherwise, the objects aren't extracted the next time she checks out the project.

Next, the Model Administration Tool locks the master repository so that Sally can merge her changes without any chance of corruption from other users' merges.

For logging purposes, Sally uses the comment field to provide a description of the changes she's publishing. Publishing frequently, or performing a subset refresh, also makes it easier to keep track of changes, and easier to audit the history later. A best practice in Model Administration Tool modeling is to work incrementally to simplify testing and reduce the complexity of each task.

Sally's changes cause no conflicts, so they don't appear in the Define Merge Strategy step that's displayed next. However, aliases for presentation objects are a special case where you can choose to keep either the modified (your local version) or current (the master), or merge the two. The aliases were automatically created when Sally changed the column names, so that reports written to the old names wouldn't break when she put the new names into production. Because Eden Corporation has no reports yet, Sally keeps the aliases empty by selecting Current. She does this for "Sales Revenue," "Units Sold," and "Discount Amount."

Sometimes, there can be a series of aliases if names change more than once. Because there might be a set of reports using the older names, you can select Merge Choices in the Define Merge Strategy screen to keep any aliases already in Current as well as the new ones in Modified.

When the merge step is complete, the master sales.rpd is overwritten with the changes from Sally. A merge log is also stored.